Presenter Biographies

Panel:

Librarianship, the Author, the Archive

Presenter’s Biographies:

Rebecca Slatcher is a final year AHRC CDP PhD candidate with the University of Hull and the British Library. She has a B.A. and M.A. in History from the University of Leeds and spent a year studying in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Her PhD focuses on the British Library’s books in North American Indigenous languages (post 1850) from the perspective of how the holdings have been collected and catalogued. Her research has benefited from a BAAS funded placement at the American Philosophical Society, and an AHRC International Placement at the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institute. She has written and spoken on cataloguing and North American Indigenous languages, and the British Library’s printed Cherokee language materials.

John H. Pollack is Curator, Research Services, in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. He is a co-organizer of the Workshop in the History of Material Texts and teaches courses with Roger Chartier and James Green.

Rowan Red Sky (Oneida Nation of the Thames) is a SSHRC-funded PhD student at University of Toronto in the Art History and Book History & Print Culture programs. She earned her BFA at OCAD University and worked for five years as a professional artist in Toronto before starting her SSHRC-funded MA at University of Toronto. Her research investigates ideas relating to land, the image culture of land in performance and print, and the ‘geographical imagination’ of nineteenth-century Indigenous and non-Indigenous North Americans. Rowan recently curated an exhibition of illustrations printed in nineteenth-century books, which was on display at Robertson Davies Library at Massey College in the fall of 2022.

Brandon Castle is the project coordinator for the Mapping Native Intellectual Networks of the Northeast project at the Amherst College Library funded by the Mellon Foundation. Brandon is currently pursuing an MLIS degree at San Jose State University through the Bridging Knowledge program which aims to support Indigenous scholars into the field of librarianship. Brandon is also a recent graduate from the University of Washington Museology Graduate Program. Brandon is originally from Ketchikan, Alaska and is a member of the Ketchikan Indian Community.

Rebecca Henning is the special collections cataloging librarian at the Amherst College Library in the Archives & Special Collections, and is primarily responsible for cataloging Special Collections materials including rare books, maps, videos, senior theses, and manuscripts. Rebecca received her MLIS degree from Simmons College in Boston in 2000, and a Certificate of Proficiency from Rare Book School at the University of Virginia in 2014.

Panel:

Making Books – Anthologies, Bibliographies, and Critical Editions

Presenter’s Biographies:

Sara Snyder Hopkins: Sara Snyder Hopkins is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Sociology and Director of the Cherokee Language Program at Western Carolina University where she teaches Cherokee language and linguistic anthropology courses. She received a PhD in Music (Ethnomusicology) from Columbia University in 2016 with coursework in linguistic anthropology at NYU. Hopkins is the editor for the forthcoming Cherokee Singing Book (1846): A Scholarly Edition (under contract with UNC Press in the Sounding Spirit series). During her doctoral fieldwork, she worked for five years as the music and arts teacher for New Kituwah Academy, the Cherokee language immersion school for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina.

Robert E. Walls, Ph.D., is a Research Associate in the American Indian Studies Research Institute at Indiana University. Previously, he taught at Lafayette College, the University of South Carolina, and the University of Notre Dame. His consulting and advocacy include working with tribes and First Nations in Washington State and British Columbia. His most recent monograph is Resilience Through Writing: A Bibliographic Guide to Indigenous-Authored Publications in the Pacific Northwest before 1960 (Memoir Series #20, Journal of Northwest Anthropology, 2021). His current book project is The New Canoe: Early Native Writing in Salish Country and Beyond, which will be a study of Indigenous literacies and post-contact writing in northwestern North America.

Sabra Thorner is a cultural anthropologist who has worked with Indigenous Australians for over 20 years, focusing on photography, digital technologies, and archiving as forms of cultural activism. In the last few years, her work has increasingly turned towards collaborative and decolonizing methodologies – in both research/writing and in teaching/learning – and she is especially interested in contemporary arts and cultural production, matriarchal forms of knowledge transmission, and storytelling as an expression of Indigenous sovereignty. She’s held fellowships from Mellon, Fulbright, Wenner-Gren, the Smithsonian, and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS); and is a named investigator on two Australian Research Council projects. She has published her work in Museum Anthropology, AnthroVision, The Journal of Material Culture, Oceania, and Visual Anthropology Review; and is a co-editor of the forthcoming Southeast Aboriginal Art: Culture-Making and Curating for Country (with Fran Edmonds and Maree Clarke; expected in 2023). She is an Assistant Professor at Mount Holyoke College.

Frances Edmonds is an interdisciplinary scholar in the fields of anthropology and ethnohistory. Her work is collaborative and participatory, aimed at decolonizing methodologies. Her research interests include: art and wellbeing; the creative use of digital technologies; youth identity; visual studies; oral history/storytelling; cultural revitalization and the archival/ethnographic record; and the intersection between Indigenous and Western knowledge systems. She is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, working on the Australian Research Council (ARC) Indigenous Discovery Project “Storytelling and the Living Archive of Aboriginal Knowledge” (2020-2023). Between 2014-2017, she was the Research Fellow responsible for conducting in-depth ethnography and collaborative research on the ARC project “Aboriginal Young People and Digital Storytelling.”

Maree Clarke (Yorta Yorta / Wamba Wamba / Mutti Mutti / Boonwurrung) is an artist and curator who grew up in Mildura (northwest Victoria), on the banks of the Murray River, and who has been living and working in Melbourne for over 30 years. She has become a pivotal figure in the revitalization of southeastern Australian Aboriginal art and cultural practices – including possum-skin cloaks, kangaroo-teeth necklaces, and eel traps, kopi mourning caps, and much more – in both traditional and contemporary materials (such as glass and 3D printing). Her practice includes lenticular prints, 3D photographs and photographic holograms, as well as painting, sculpture, and video installation. The through-line of her work is to facilitate intercultural dialogue and collaboration about the ongoing effects of colonization, while simultaneously providing space for Aboriginal people and communities to engage with and mourn the impact of dispossession and loss. She is deeply committed to transmitting knowledge to younger generations (and anyone else who is willing to learn). Clarke has exhibited her work widely in Australia and beyond, and her work is held by the Koorie Heritage Trust, Museums Victoria, and the National Gallery of Australia. In 2021, her work was featured in a major retrospective, Ancestral Memories, at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Panel:

Reviving, Reclaiming, and Redefining Genres

Presenter’s Biographies:

Jessica Cory teaches in the English Studies Department at Western Carolina University and is a PhD candidate specializing in Native American, African American, and environmental literature at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is the editor of Mountains Piled upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene (WVU Press, 2019) and the co-editor (with Laura Wright) of Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place (UGA Press, forthcoming 2023). Her creative and scholarly writings have been published in the North Carolina Literary Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Northern Appalachia Review, and other fine publications.

Marie Balsley Taylor: Marie Balsley Taylor is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Alabama where she teaches Early American and Native American literature. She is also a Research Affiliate at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Early Modern History. Her monograph, Indigenous Kinship, Colonial Texts, and the Contested Space of Early New England is forthcoming this summer from the University of Massachusetts Press as part of the Native Americans of the Northeast series.

Angelica Waner is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA. Her dissertation centers three bilingual (Zapotec/Diidxazá-Spanish) literary magazines that were published in Mexico City and Juchitán from the 1930s to the 1990s. She is interested in exploring themes of Indigenous identity formation, Indigenous epistemologies, and relationships to the nation-state. At UCLA, she is also involved with the first-generation graduate student community and coordinates a mentoring program in her department.

David Medina is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of English and American Literature at Massachusetts Bay Community College where he teaches courses on Native American literature, Early American Literature, and English composition. David is also PhD Candidate in the department of English at Northeastern University writing a dissertation under the direction of Elizabeth Maddock Dillon. In his dissertation project, Amores Amoxtli, David examines the relationship between textualities and aesthetics in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Latin American literature. His broader research interests include Native American literature, Critical Bibliography, and Decolonial Aesthetics. David has also recently accepted a tenure-earning Assistant Professor of English position at Florida Atlantic University

Panel:

Book Arts: Visuality, Typography, and Design

Presenter’s Biographies:

Jeremy M. Carnes is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida. He is working on his first book project which examines comics by Indigenous creators and the rhetorical affordances of comics as a visual medium for considering land-based practices. He is also the reviews editor for Studies in American Indian Literatures.

Marina Garone Gravier, PhD Art History (UNAM, México) is a researcher at the Bibliographic Research Institute at the National University of Mexico (2009-present), a member of the National System of Researchers of Mexico (2010-present) and a concurrent researcher at the Aesthetic Research Institute and American Art of the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina (2014-present). Garone is founder and coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Seminar on Bibliology at UNAM (2012-present), and the Latin American Network of Graphic Culture (2017-present). Her research topics included Book history, printing and visual culture in Latinamerica, and Design & Gender relationships. Her awards include the Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran Medal for her PhD Dissertation Historia de la tipografía colonial para lenguas indígenas, given by Veracruzana University and CIESAS in 2010; and García Cubas Price for her book La tipografía en México. Ensayos históricos, given by the National Institute of History and Antropology in 2013, and also in 2021 the García Cubas Price for her book Libros e imprenta en México en el siglo XVI. Garone has published more than 10 books, including: Historia de la imprenta y la tipografía colonial Puebla de los Ángeles (1642-1821) (UNAM, 2015), and El Arte de ymprenta de Alejandro Valdés (1819), (FOEM, 2016).

Jared Hickman is an associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery (Oxford UP, 2016) and the co-editor of two volumes: Abolitionist Places (Routledge, 2013) and Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon (Oxford UP, 2019). His current research is on the comparative literature of what historian James Belich has called the "Anglo-prone" "settler revolution" in nineteenth-century , which is reflected in recently published and forthcoming work on the palimpsest of Anglo settler colonialism in the historical romances of James McHenry, billed as "the first Irish-American novelist"; the engagement of early Black Atlantic literature with the intertwined histories of Atlantic slavery and settler colonialism; and the foreclosure of comparative settler-colonial studies early in American studies' emergence as a field. He is currently working on two related book projects that reconsider the problem of the persistence of "the romance" as an opportunity for a transhistorical investigation of settler colonialism—from Anglo-Saxons and Normans in Britain and Ireland in the twelfth century to their descendants in North America and the Pacific in the nineteenth.

Allison Siehnel is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her research and teaching focus on multiethnic, especially Indigenous American, prose and poetry from early settler contact through the present, and she traces relationships among representations of unbuilt Native and non-Native built environments in what is now called the United States. Her most recent publication on antebellum public parks and nature poetry appeared in Modernism in the Green: Public Greens in Modern Literature and Culture. She is working on a book about Northeastern Indigenous American writing in early American print culture.

Panel:

Production, Circulation, Audience

Presenter’s Biographies:

Asha Rogers is Associate Professor in Contemporary Postcolonial Literature in the Department of English Literature at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. She has published on literary and cultural institutions, African and African-diaspora Cold War literary cultures, and literary archives. Her first book, State Sponsored Literature: Britain and Cultural Diversity after 1945 (OUP, 2020), an account of the British state’s role in the literary field through expressive acts of funding, subsidy and cultural policy, won the 2021 University English Prize.

Lisa McGunigal: Lisa McGunigal is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tampa. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century American literature and cultural studies, particularly the influence of public performance sites on novels and short stories. She has published her work in in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, American Literary Realism, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, and The Mark Twain Annual.

Sonia Hazard is Assistant Professor of Religion at Florida State University. She is a scholar of American religious history in the nineteenth century, specializing in print media of the period. Her first book Building Evangelical America: How the American Tract Society Laid the Groundwork for a Religious Revolution (forthcoming from Oxford University Press) bridges methods from book history, bibliography, STS, and new materialisms to provide a “media infrastructuralist” account of the rise of evangelical power before the Civil War. Questions about media and its consequences continue to inform her current book project on Cherokee Christian printing, which parses how the material qualities, meanings, and uses of print in Cherokee Nation changed over time and across the ruptures of removal.

Ben Pokross is a PhD candidate in English at Yale University and an Advisory Council Dissertation Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. His dissertation, “Writing History in the Nineteenth-Century Great Lakes”, examines historical writing as it developed between settler and Native communities in the nineteenth century. His work has been supported by the Clements Library, the Newberry Library, and the American Philosophical Society.

Panel:

Community Engaged Partnerships and Collaborations

Presenter’s Biographies:

Rachel Linnea Brown, PhD, is Chair of the Department of Media, Design, and Communication and an Assistant Professor of English at Marian University. She is an expert in archival studies and multiethnic American literatures, especially Native American oral, textual, visual, and material traditions. A forthcoming book chapter assesses linguistic resistance among Native boarding school students, and she has previously published in Studies in American Indian Literatures. Among other initiatives, she has collaborated with the Indiana Miami on ENG 380: American Indian Film & Literature (Fall 2021) as well as two NEH grant applications totaling $185,000.

Evan Casey is an Assistant Professor of History at Marian University with expertise in American history, specifically Antebellum, Civil War, Reconstruction, and African American history. In this role, he works with other faculty to deliver innovative curriculum, serve as a student mentor, recruit future students, and foster a friendship with the Indiana Miami. During his master’s capstone, he conducted and completed an Action Research Project, which involved creating curriculum for adult learners that focuses on improving their language arts skills and incorporating ‘grit and perseverance.’ This approach improved students’ performance on tests and their overall well-being. He is currently earning his Ed.D. in Institutional Leadership through Marian University.

Keith Layman is the Special Projects Coordinator for the Indiana Miami, a local historian, and an author with training in budgeting and project management. In this role, Layman communicates Tribal news and advocates for the Tribe to a wide audience. He also participates in and helps organize events for the Indiana Miami and coordinates fundraising efforts. His BA in history, graduate coursework in the history of US diplomacy, and status as an adopted Tribal member offer background knowledge and cultural context that will inform his work on the Tribe’s book series.

Silvermoon LaRose: Silvermoon Mars LaRose, a member of the Narragansett Tribe, is the Assistant Director of the Tomaquag Museum. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology, a minor in Justice Law and Society from the University of Rhode Island, and continued her studies at Western Washington University focusing on a Masters in Rehabilitation Counseling. Silvermoon has worked in tribal communities for over 20 years, serving in the areas of health and human services, education, and humanities. As an artist and educator, she hopes to foster Indigenous empowerment through education, community building, and the sharing of cultural knowledge and traditional arts.

Melissa Michal Slocum: Melissa Michal Slocum’s work focuses on her community’s histories and experiences. She is of Seneca, Welsh, and English descent and is a fiction and screenplay writer, essayist, photographer, and a DEI coach and Consultant. She currently resides on Narragansett territory. Melissa has work appearing in The Florida Review, Arkana, Yellow Medicine Review, Transmotion, Presumed Incompetent the second edition, and other spaces. Her short story collection, Living Along the Borderlines (2019), out with Feminist Press, was a finalist for the Louise Meriwether first book prize. She has drafted a screenplay adaptation of her story, “The Long Goodbye” from that collection. Her first novel and essay collection are both finished and she is at work on a new dystopian novel.

Rochelle Raineri Zuck is an associate professor of English at Iowa State University. She is the author of Divided Sovereignties: Race, Nationhood, and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Georgia Press, 2016), and her work has appeared in journals such as American Periodicals, Studies in American Indian Literatures, American Studies, Eighteenth-Century Studies, ELH, and Early American Literature. She is currently working on a book-length project on Indigenous editors and periodicals.

Panel:

Materiality and Form

Presenter’s Biographies:

Emily Gowen is the 2022-23 John B. Hench Post-Dissertation Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. She holds a PhD in English and American Literature from Boston University, where she taught in the English department and Writing Program. She has held research fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the BU Center for the Humanities. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literature, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, The Edgar Allan Poe Review, Early American Literature, and several online outlets. Her work explores the intersections of the rise of the novel, the history of print, and the problem of social inequality in the nineteenth-century United States.

Patricia Roylance is an associate professor of English at Syracuse University, and author of Eclipse of Empires: World History in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (University of Alabama Press, 2013). Their current book project, The Textures of Time in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Media, explores the temporalities associated with various media forms, including indigenous Haudenosaunee forms.

Kristen Brown: Kristen Brown is an assistant professor with the Department of English at Northern State University in Aberdeen, SD. While earning her Ph.D. in English and American Literature at The University of South Carolina, she designed her own minor in Indigenous Studies with emphasis on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her research was funded in part by the national Bilinski Dissertation Fellowship. Kristen’s research and teaching turn attention to Indigenous author-activists who leveraged their awareness of colonizing discourse to critique those ideologies and mobilize support against dispossessive frameworks of settler governance. Seeking to center and amplify Indigenous voices, she situates them within an expanding genealogy of Indigenous resilience. In addition to recent scholarship published in Western American Literature and Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, she has an essay forthcoming in a book titled Race in the Multiethnic Literature Classroom wherein she considers how Dakota author-activist Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa) uses storytelling to challenge the logics of settler civilization projects while carving space for common ground.

Isabel Dulfano: Isabel Dulfano is a professor in the department of World Languages at the University of Utah. Her latest book (Dec. 2022, Peter Lang) Walking on our Sacred Path Indigenous American Women Affirming Identity and Activism contains excerpts from interviews with Indigenous women from the North, South and Latin Americas. Her earlier books are Woman as Witness: Essays on Testimonial Literature by Latin American Women (2004 Peter Lang) and Indigenous Feminist Narratives I/We: Wo(men) of an(Other) Way (2015).

Lyuba Basin: Lyuba Basin is the Rare Books Curator at the J. Willard Marriott Library, at the University of Utah. Prior to completing a graduate degree in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Lyuba was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to teach in English in Argentina. There she developed her pedagogy in teaching with rare materials and artists’ books, which was published in the university textbook, Express Yourself: Exploring Creativity in English Language Education (2018). In her personal and professional life, she pursues the connections found within languages and literature. More specifically, Lyuba is interested in the materiality of the book and its relationship to historical, political, and cultural contexts.